Doctor Who 60th Anniversary: 4 Quick Questions About That Trailer

Posted in: BBC, Doctor Who, Opinion, TV, TV | Tagged: bbc, catherine tate, david tennant, doctor who, neil patrick harris, russell t davies

A new trailer for the Doctor Who 60th Anniversary Specials was released at the end of Eurovision tonight & we have some questions about it.

These are the inevitable things in life: Death and Taxes – and under Russell T. Davies, more trailers and teasers for Doctor Who. Hurrah! Now that the UK got to host the Eurovision Song Contest this year, why wouldn't Davies and the BBC trot out a new Doctor Who teaser for the 60th Anniversary as icing on the cake? Eurovision is a joy! Insane, campy joy, so Doctor Who is a perfect cherry on top! We're not going to delve into the secret messages embedded in code numbers and subliminals in the new teaser trailer. We'll leave it to cleverer and more obsessive people to unpick those. Instead, we'll just put our first reaction questions here.

The first special is titled "The Star Beast," which is the same title as the original comic story in Doctor Who Weekly magazine in 1980 by 2000AD creators John Wagner & Pat Mills and drawn by Dave Gibbons that introduced fluffy but evil alien Beep the Meep. Beep showed up again several times in the comics all the way into the 1990s with new evil schemes that the Doctor thwarted. So will Beep become a semi-regular villain in the show's canon?

There's a good business reason for that: TOYS. Just look at him! Doctor Who toys and merchandise is a major money-maker for the BBC and toy manufacturers. Doctor Who is also a business, after all. Davies knows exactly what he's going here.

Russell T. Davies has been teasing heartbreak about Donna's return. This could be Catherine Tate's final outing. He wouldn't kill her off, would he? Davies does love to make viewers cry. Just look at, well, every single one of his other series for television. It's a Sin was nothing but perpetual death and heartbreak, but then it was about the beginning of the AIDS crisis in the UK after all. Is it any wonder that he would want to come back to a lighter (well, only slightly) show like Doctor Who after that?

Fans seem convinced that Neil Patrick Harris is playing the Celestial Toymaker, or The Toymaker if they remove "celestial" from his name because that word used to be a negative term for Chinese immigrants. Other fans think he's the Valeyard because they just can't let their obsession with that dullest of Doctor Who villains go. The Valeyard is only an evil future incarnation of the Doctor. We already have an evil version of The Doctor in The Master. We're not going to tell anyone not to like what they like, but whatever. If Davies wants to use the 60th Anniversary to put the Valeyard to rest once and for all, we're all for that.

The three 60th Anniversary specials are a mini-season that's a chance to revisit the heyday of Doctor Who – namely, David Tennant and Catherine Tate's era when the show was at its peak. Every first episode with a new Doctor is practically a pilot episode for a new show. It's designed to be a jumping-on point for new and returning viewers. There are viewers who stopped watching when Tennant or Matt Smith left, which means they've been away for up to ten years or more. Now Tennant and Tate are back for a three-episode mini-season to transition Doctor Who into the Disney+ era with Ncuti Gatwa and Millie Gibson.

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